3,617 Words About Luke Skywalker

A young man gazes at the horizon. His life on the farm is hopeless, boring, dead-end. He dreams of leaving, of going far, far away, of pursuing adventure and excitement—he’s heard war stories about his father, the long-dead father he never met, so he knows it’s possible. But he doesn’t know how to make it a reality. He returns to the farmhouse. The twin suns set on his desert planet, and he goes to bed to dream.

This is Luke Skywalker, the hero of Star Wars. Everyone knows him and his story: the dark irony of his parentage, his difficult rise and ultimate triumph, the sacrifices the journey required of him, and, for those who watched The Last Jedi, the messy aftermath of his success. But his story is so well-known—so archetypical—that it’s easy to reduce to the shorthand of the hero’s journey.

For almost all of my life, Luke Skywalker has been my idol and my inspiration, the character through whom I have long viewed myself and the worlds I’ve moved through. At different stages he has meant different things to me, and in his arc I see the complicated promise and tragedy of life itself. As a kid, I surely wanted to be Luke, but as time has gone on I’ve wanted to understand better what it’s like to be him: Who is he, really? How does he understand the shifts of his destiny? How does he look back on the legendary self he created? And what does all this tell us about our own lives and potentials—or at least about mine?

In other words, Luke Skywalker deserves some real consideration for once. Not as a Jedi, not as an icon, but as a human being who had to endure a life he could never have imagined. That’s what I’m here to do¹.

Part I: The Dream

Luke’s story in the first Star Wars movie is pure Joseph Campbell: A boy who longs for a glorious destiny leaves home (the desert planet Tatooine), finds a wise mentor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), overcomes challenges both physical (surviving the Death Star) and emotional (losing Obi-Wan), and eventually defeats the bad guys (the Death Star and Darth Vader), winning a medal and the attention, if not yet the hand, of the princess (Leia). He doesn’t return home, but instead has found a new home in the Rebel Alliance. Cue the John Williams!

For Luke, this is also pure wish fulfillment. The movie is slick and exciting, with special effects no one had seen before, and it hums along with energy, thanks mostly to Alec Guinness (wry and bemused as Obi-Wan), Harrison Ford (born to be Han Solo), and the menagerie of colorful droids and creatures who surround them. By contrast, Luke ain’t much of anything: a nice kid, honest and naïve, moderately talented as a pilot, but most of all eager to learn whatever anyone is willing to teach him—eager for attention. As played by Mark Hamill, Luke is a blank canvas, less interesting, maybe, to a grown-up audience but a figure of wonder for a generation of young boys like me. Who cares who Luke is. Look what he does!

I kinda want to give Luke a pass here: He’s 19, after all! Should he be fully formed? A cocky, idiosyncratic jock? An introspective mechanic? Were any of us at that age the people we would become even a few years later? Luke in Star Wars doesn’t need to be anything more than what he is: a good guy.

But because he’s so sweet and earnest, he never questions the reality of his situation: He has no agency in his own heroic story. His life is ruled by events that began long before his birth: the conflict between Obi-Wan and Luke’s father, Anakin Skywalker; Anakin’s “killing” by Darth Vader; and the whole galaxy of politics and personalities that swirled around them and the rest of the Republic—these bring the rebellion to Luke’s doorstep, killing his aunt and uncle, and requiring him to flee in order to survive. Sure, this is what he wanted, but his desires don’t matter here, except for the desire not to be killed by Stormtroopers, or garbage-disposal monsters, or chasms, or Tie Fighters. Luke has no time to contemplate his situation because every moment of the movie is life-or-death, all the way up until Luke barrels down the Death Star trench in his X-Wing and launches a torpedo into an air duct to blow the thing to smithereens.

Even then, in his moment of triumph, he has to give up agency. “Trust the Force,” whispers the ghost of Obi-Wan, who has been “turned into a shirt,” as my own dad used to joke, by Vader’s lightsaber. Trust the Force, Luke, turn off your targeting computer, and let destiny and destiny alone guide you.

It’s a weird turn, isn’t it? You dream of greatness and glory, but to achieve them you must erase yourself; to the extent you exist, it’s to allow the hand of god to act through you.

As a kid, of course, I couldn’t see any of this. I saw only Luke’s obvious arc, from zero to hero, and imagined one day it could be my own. (Yes, I literally wanted to be a Jedi and travel the galaxy.) I can hardly have been alone among Gen-Xers in this; the increasing popularity of the baby name Luke is my evidence. In 2000, it was ranked 59; in 2023, it had grown to no. 31.

Part II: The Cost of the Dream

There is no evidence that the Luke of Star Wars has any perspective on his situation, but in The Empire Strikes Back, it begins to creep in. The movie begins on the ice world Hoth, where Luke, out on patrol, gets walloped by a yeti-like Wampa, escapes into the snowy wastes, and has a vision of Obi-Wan, who tells him to go to the planet Dagobah and seek out Yoda, the Jedi master who once trained him. OK, sure, why not?

When he gets to Dagobah, however, it turns out to be a truly shitty place—all swamps and swamp monsters and mud and rain and vines—and all Yoda does is speak in ass-backwards riddles. Plus, he’s a terrible cook.

It’s not all bad, though. There’s a lot of fun athletic training—running and jumping and doing flips while wearing Yoda in a backpack—and Luke learns how to make rocks float, which everyone knows is a key Jedi skill.

Quickly, though, things get dark. Luke wanders into a dark tree-cave where he confronts an imaginary Darth Vader, cuts off his head with a lightsaber, and discovers that under that black mask is … his very own face! Ominous much? Meanwhile, Luke learns that all his friends are being imprisoned and tortured by the actual Vader, and he’s ready to take off to go help—because he is still a good boy!—but motherfucking Yoda’s response is: “If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.“ Stay here, finish your training, let destiny take its course. Do nothing. Be nothing. This ain’t about you, Luke.

Luke doesn’t get it. Till now, he’s gone along with the instructions. He knows he’s supposed to avoid anger and hatred, or he might get seduced by the dark side. He gets that there’s this monastic side to being a Jedi, but are you really supposed to just let your friends suffer and die? Who would allow that? How could he—destiny’s tool, after all—not act? So off he flies to Cloud City, where he confronts Darth Vader, gets his ass kicked by flying HVAC units and his right hand lightsabered off, and learns the Man in Black is actually his father.

If you identify with Luke, this is a damn low point. Not only is the worst guy in the galaxy your dad, but the people you looked up to—your own heroes and idols—were lying to you about it all along. (It was not a lie, Obi-Wan’s ghost will later tell him, “from a certain point of view.”) Red-faced and blubbering (also maybe not Mark Hamill’s greatest moment), Luke denies it—to Vader and to himself: “No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!” And, refusing Vader’s offer to join him and rule the galaxy as father and son, Luke chooses the ultimate self-abnegation: suicide. He lets himself fall into the void, embracing the inevitability of becoming nobody at all. Yoda was right: The only winning move is not to play.

Thing is, Luke doesn’t die. After passing through a series of tubes, he winds up back with his friends on the Millennium Falcon, and just before the credits roll, he’s even got a new, robotic hand. On the surface, he hasn’t lost anything tangible—he has functional digits, and his buddy Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, not dead. All’s well that ends…

Well, something has changed in Luke, however. When the next movie, Return of the Jedi, begins, Luke is a new man: calm, self-possessed, in full control of his actions and emotions. He is, at last, a Jedi knight, in bearing if not title. Facing down Jabba the Hutt, the sluglike crime lord of Tatooine, in an elaborate attempt to rescue Han Solo, he’s unfazed by the danger either to himself or to his friends—nothing can happen that destiny does not will. He reminds me of those soldiers who confront fear on the battlefield by telling themselves they’re dead already, because if they’re dead, nothing can make it worse.

Luke is also, now, boring. Whatever was once human about him—his naïveté, his easy camaraderie with his friends‚ his bottomless desire for a meaningful future—is gone². His loyalties remain, he wouldn’t be back on Tatooine without them, but they feel dutiful, not emotional. He might love Han and Leia, but he also needs them for the Rebellion. He’s all purpose, no personality.

This is his state of being throughout Return of the Jedi: above it all. Nothing can touch him, not the escalating battle with the Empire, not the death of Yoda. I struggle to imagine what’s in his head in this movie—nothing at all, perhaps, because he’s decided that the less present Luke Skywalker is, the better for everyone.

The climactic moment of the movie is entirely about this: Having smuggled himself onto the new Death Star, he confronts his father, Darth Vader, and, in front of the evil Emperor, they have an epic lightsaber battle. Luke, now a better swordsman, dominates the fight, then loses control of his emotions, hammering away furiously at dad until he finally slices off pop’s hand. At which point he pulls himself together, tamps down those emotions, and goes the Bartleby route, refusing to end his father’s life, embrace the dark side, and succumb to the Emperor’s will. In the face of destiny, Luke would rather be passive and die than defy his fate, and the Emperor, itching to zap him with Force lightning, is only too happy to help him along the way.

The Luke of Return of the Jedi is a mystery: inserting himself into the story but present only long enough to absent himself. Once he was the kid who wanted nothing more than to have a destiny; now destiny needs him. He is instrumental in changing the fate of the galaxy, except that it’s others who change that fate: Vader kills the Emperor, Lando Calrissian blows up the new Death Star, and Leia (and Han) will lead some kind of post-Imperial government. All Luke had to do was show up, and the rest of the cast knew what to do.

It’s hard to tell if Luke was aware of this. At the very end, as he burns his father’s body on a funeral pyre, he appears full of… something. It doesn’t look like sadness—maybe regret? Actually, I’d love it if it was regret: Regret that fate, the force to which he’s bowed for so long, had chosen such a perverse path, robbing him of a father, and a mentor, and a chance to be something other than an affectless space monk. In an alternate timeline, could he have grown up the son of a Jedi, a freewheeling pilot who explored the Outer Rim, made friends he wouldn’t have to abandon, maybe even had children of his own? What could his present be if destiny hadn’t got its hooks into the previous generation? Is he coming to realize the burden he bears, now that he, the first Jedi in decades, has saved the galaxy from its autocratic overlords?

No, this is pure projection: Return of the Jedi ends in raw celebration. Our heroes have become legends, and that’s totally fine with them, and us kids who’ve been on their side for years get to cheer unironically. Yub Nub!

Part III: The Wake-Up Call

If everything ended there, there wouldn’t be much to say. The good guys won, the bad guys lost, and the goodest of the good guys doesn’t really have anything to add to the story. Luke’s character and stature would essentially be frozen in carbonite, a sorry plaything for Hutts and geeks alike.

But then we have The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, the first two movies in the so-called sequel trilogy, which takes place about 30 years after Return of the Jedi. And these complicate everything we thought we knew about Luke Skywalker, turning him at last into a human being we can relate to.

In short, things have not been going great for the New Republic, the democratic alliance of planets, which is threatened by the warmongering remnants of the Empire, calling themselves the First Order and led by Force-wielding Dark Siders Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis, the hardest-working man in Hollywood). Worse, Luke Skywalker, our goddamn savior in the last round, has disappeared. No one knows where the dude has gone off to, but everyone has their fingers crossed that the legend will show up and kick butt once again. Cuz that’s what legends do, right?

By the time we geolocate Luke, at the very end of The Force Awakens and the beginning of The Last Jedi, it’s clear that he’s not the Jedi we once knew. Whereas in Return of the Jedi Luke was detached, now he’s just not fucking interested. Rey, the young new Force hero played by Daisy Ridley, has brought him the lightsaber he lost to Vader (along with his hand); he chucks it over his shoulder (with his robot-hand). He’d rather spend his days drinking green milk from anthropomorphic Irish manatees than show her what it means to be a Jedi. He’s scruffy, he’s athletically confident, he’s a Luke we’ve never seen before—funny and self-aware.

“You think what?” he asks Rey when she demands his help. “I'm gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order? What did you think was going to happen here? You think that I came to the most unfindable place in the galaxy for no reason at all?”

This Luke is awesome. This Luke feels like a dude who’s been through something and come out the other end wounded and struggling to cope. Over the course of The Last Jedi, we learn what that something was: Luke had started his own Jedi academy, one of whose students was Luke and Han’s son, Ben, a powerful and talented Force user whose personality had its own dark side. Afraid of Ben, Luke in a moment of weakness decided to kill the teen—but pulled back—but pulled back too late, for Ben had witnessed this threat, and fought back, and wound up killing the other students and destroying the academy and running off to become Kylo Ren, ruining Luke’s dreams of restoring the Jedi Order, not to mention his own self-conception as a restrained, passive master who acted only when fate dictated it.

The movie is always in motion, so it doesn’t really linger on this—but I have. And oh man, what a tragedy! The boy from the ass end of the galaxy, who dreamed of a glorious destiny for himself, actually found it, achieved what he was meant to, turned his own name into a legend, then floundered and failed when he had to write his next act. The world of adults—of adults and their children—was messier and more challenging than the one he’d grown up in, where fighting skills, placid faith, and monkish nobility could turn the tide of a star-spanning war. What a gut punch that must have been, to know that you were chosen for one glory but not for this seemingly more minor one! What was the point of any of it, this Luke must have asked himself: We defeated the Empire and carved a space where we could safely teach people to use the Force—and it’s not only an instant catastrophe but also threatens everything we achieved three decades ago. Why did I bother?

It gets worse: Rey, under Luke’s reluctant tutelage, realizes that Luke has cut himself off from the Force. He doesn’t use it, he doesn’t let himself feel that special connection to all life in the universe, he refuses to use the gift he was blessed with—the gift that allowed him to achieve everything we associate with the name Luke Skywalker. What can I say? I feel his pain. Everything Luke has worked to achieve has been for nought, so how can he wake up every morning and face the Force, this omnipresent reminder of the potential he’s failed to live up to? He can’t—it’s heartbreaking. And so he cuts himself off, a choice that feels deeply perverse in light of his previous self-abnegations: If my greatest successes were based in absenting myself and letting destiny take hold, then I’m really going to take myself off the board this time.

I love this Luke. He’s wild and scruffy and forlorn, wise yet cynical, avuncular yet hermitic. (Mark Hamill is so good at this.) Where once I wanted to become him, now I see myself in him—someone who has lived and succeeded and failed and come to question everything that has brought him to this point, and also still sees no other path but the one he took. To live, as a Jedi or as a writer or as a human being, is to risk each new hope being met with disappointment, yet somehow carry on, trying in vain to reconcile your past with your present and, if not triumph in the next round, then at least not fail quite so badly. Luke Skywalker is every midlife Gen Xer—or maybe every midlife everybody. I don’t know if I grew up into him, or if he grew up into us.

The Last Jedi ends with a beautiful irony. Persuaded by Yoda’s cackling ghost to help, Luke transports himself halfway across the galaxy and onto the salt-plain landscape where Leia’s few remaining Resistance fighters are trapped by Kylo Ren and the First Order. Luke strides out to face them, the bearded legend in the solid flesh, a challenge Kylo Ren can’t deny. They engage in the lightsaber battle to end all lightsaber battles, full of cool moves and cool quips, and it buys time for the Resistance to escape, until Luke reveals that it’s all been a ruse: He has, at long last, reconnected with the Force in order to project his mere image, not his person, onto the battlefield. The hero who always won by removing himself from the equation has won again—by not being there in the first place. If destiny seemed to be done with him, then he was free to ignore it, to act as he wished even if, physically, he did nothing.

And once he’s done, once his friends have escaped and Kylo Ren has been put in his place, once his galaxy-shaking mastery of the Force has been demonstrated, Luke Skywalker himself disappears into the ether, vanishing for the last time from a rocky perch above the roiling seas. He turns into a shirt. There’s nothing left but the legend.

I miss this Luke. We grew up together, whether he knew it or not, but I feel like we never got to spend enough time in each other’s company. What I got were glimpses—shining, searing glimpses of a boy who dreamed big, who lived his dream, and who, even when the dream turned to nightmare, found his way back to the dream, and to being the dreamer. With Luke’s story at an end, without his destiny to guide me, I have to admit I feel adrift among the stars. But this is what happens at midlife—people leave you. People leave you, and you have no choice but to continue on your own hero’s journey, hoping that fate will be kind, or at least patient, and that the Force will be with you, always. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. The Star Wars movies, especially the first three (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), are not particularly introspective about these matters, so I’ll probably be doing a lot of projecting here. I’ll also be ignoring pretty much all of the copious secondary Star Wars material—books, comics, those three movies they made from 1999 to 2005—because I haven’t read it and don’t really care. I’m a nerd in a lot of ways, but not that one. back to the top

2. Or almost gone: He and Han get one good exchange:
   Han Solo: How we doin'?

   Luke: Same as always.

   Han Solo: That bad, huh?

Read Yesterday’s Attempt